‘None may linger; all must always move’: A new book of Anand Thakore’s poems written over 30 years

Threesome

So now you call long-distance to remind me
My late friend is not just mine to mourn,
But also yours –
Though things turned sour between you,
And the two of you haven’t spoken in twenty years.
I understand: you wish to reclaim a lost right to grief,
And to tell me – though, of course, you do not mention this –
That in the great list of things we have shared, you and I –
Tarkovsky, Tolkien, riverfish in mustard sauce,
Boat rides, skinny-dipping, rain,
The same therapist, the same cheap rooms in gimcrack hotels –
We must not now forget to include
A dead man’s insatiable, irretrievable member.
You will want to fondle them, perhaps,
When you read this, alone in your room
On your laptop screen with the lights switched off,
The breasts I could never quite bring myself to share –
Though I tried, believe me –
With the recently dead.

On Reading Richard II a Second Time

So is it in the music of men’s lives…   

— – Shakespeare, 'Richard II'

Is it because you will never now hear
The things I still have left to say,
That I begin to hear this?

– Sense and cadence of a pair of lines,
Once glanced at and passed by
Without so much as a pause –

Your absence alerts me to a music I was deaf to,
Teaching me to linger
Upon the cold stone slabs of a prison cell
Where a man who once wore a crown
Is about to be murdered.

I want you to hear him cry for silence,
Fearing the sound of a string will drive him mad.

That’s How It Feels

You claimed you preferred the safety of public spaces;
To appear at bookstores, a park, a hotel pool.
I had grown attuned to your frequent assaults on sleep;
Till late last night you chose to blast the rule,

And accost me in a room where only you could see me.
Your eyes held mine with a stare hell-bent on slaughter.
I recall a feverish ripping of shirts, the pressure
Of nails on astonished skin, but little thereafter,

Except the sound of the flesh crying out for more.
When you bit my lips I’m certain they bled.
You loosened your grip, then rose and reached for the door.

A salt-lamp quivered in the dark. There, you said,
I told you one day you’d get what you’ve always longed for:
That’s how it feels to get fucked awake by the dead.

Sea Link

A swerve to the left and at last I can see from outside
The city I was raised in: at the edge of the village on my right,
A finger of rock laid bare by an ebbing tide,
The skyline retreating in darkness and halogen light.

Surely the voice at once spoke true and lied
That said I belong to this city of slums and towers.
There’s a side of me that wants to cast aside
What links us together to commonly call it ours.

And bound to it in concrete this – our very own
Brand new Sea Link – remains inseverable from what I love
And long to flee; though it claims to stand alone.

Here none may linger; all must always move.
It isn’t true, but there’s relief in pretending one
Is through, as taut white cables fly backwards above.

Brazil

When first she brought you home I must have been seven;
She who had flown in triumph half-way around you.
Now past fifty I know I have not been forgiven
For being so unlike her. The countries I have visited are few.

From the shelf where you sit Brazil stares me in the face,
Amidst wide strips of unconquered sea and land.
Surely it’s no crime to stay rooted to one place!
I have moved in ways she could never understand,

Gazing at what’s right here as at seas from an airplane –
And there’s some comfort there…though I remain
Drawn at times to that glorious curve she drew,
Traversing with a single finger one half of you;
The circle she began and left me to complete:
Wiser by far, mother, not to compete.

Excerpted with permission from In Praise of Bone: New and Selected Poems (1991-2021), Anand Thakore, Speaking Tiger Books.